Adjusting the environmental controls

Growing public support of conservation is a good thing. But when government gets involved in environmentalism, it quickly becomes an exercise in increasing bureaucratic power:

Every adult should be forced to use a 'carbon ration card' when they pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy, MPs say.

The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain's CO2 emissions without penalising the poor.

Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights...

For the scheme to work, the Government would need to give out 45 million carbon cards - each one linked to a personal carbon account. Every year, the account would be credited with a notional amount of CO2 in kilograms.

Every time someone makes a purchase of petrol, energy or airline tickets, they would use up credits. A return flight from London to Rome would, for instance, use up 900kg of CO2 credits, while 10 litres of petrol would use up 23kg.

I'm sure the government will be smart enough to figure out how to adjust those allowances based on occupation (will truckers get the same credits as a stay-at-home mom?), and their systems will be foolproof and easy to use. After all, they've done such a great job of managing the myriad other public systems that intrude on our lives.

It's one thing to live responsibly on an individual level. But trying to reengineer society in this fashion only serves to increase Leviathan's power. Khrushchev and the Soviets failed to "bury the west," but in the name of 'saving the planet' we may yet put ourselves in the socialist chains they hoped to fashion for us.